In many applications capacitive acoustic transducers, such as condenser microphones, used in heating aids, are required to be quite small. As the transducers shrink to smaller and smaller volume the cavity compliance decreases proportionally. Cavity compliance is defined as the cavity volume divided by the bulk modulus of the fluid in the cavity: it is an indication of the ability of the cavity to absorb extra fluid when subject to an increase in pressure. The decrease in cavity compliance causes the 3 dB roll-off point or low frequency corner to shift upwardly in frequency, thereby dramatically reducing the low-frequency response of the transducer. This severely constrains the performance of such transducers when they must be made small, and conversely limits the size reduction when good low-frequency response is required such as in hearing aids, where the corner frequency may be 200 Hz, or in microphones for telephone and communication equipment, which may require frequency corners as low as 20 Hz. One attempt to address this problem uses sophisticated electronic circuitry which adds substantially to the cost and complexity and detracts from reliability. Conventional acoustic transducers have used a stretched polymer diaphragm which is metallized on one side. A hole is punched through the diaphragm to allow the pressure to balance on opposite sides of the diaphragm. However, in more recent developments the equalization hole was replaced by a slot which served the additional function of separating most of the diaphragm from the support layer leaving only limited interconnecting sections which acted as springs. See U.S. Pat. No. 5,146,435. This enabled the diaphragm, made of a stiffer material such as gold, nickel, copper, silicon, iron, polycrystalline silicon, silicon dioxide, silicon nitride, silicon carbide, titanium, chromium, platinum, palladium, aluminum, or their alloys to behave flexibly and facilitated the fabrication of the device from a single, even monolithic, structure made by micromachining photolithographic techniques compatible with integrated circuit manufacturing. With this additional function placed on the slot it appeared that the rather long length of the slot, coupled with its width, made an area which necessarily resulted in a much higher low frequency corner or 3 dB roll-off point, and that in such integrated circuit fabrications good low-frequency response was simply unavailable using typical micromachined size slots.